Marcus Coates

GRANPALAZZO

Workplace is pleased to present the work of Marcus Coates at this years's GRANPALAZZO.

Since 2004 Marcus Coates (b. London, 1968) has been developing an ongoing body of work in which he performs a shamanic ritual on behalf of a live audience. Through a combination of his earnestness as a Shaman, the absurdity of the Shamanic ritual in a contemporary setting, and his deadpan documentary style Coates seeks a new subjectivity for himself and in turn an approach to pragmatism that is irrational, uncontrolled, yet effective. Coates questions how culture supports our separation from nature and reflects on how nature as a human concept is a clear definition of our own needs and troubles as a species. The presentation for GRANPALAZZO 2016 includes films of his rituals, where he achieves a trance-like state and communes with the animal kingdom to address social issues as well as objects that address our problematic relationship with nature and thus ourselves. Ritual for Reconciliation (2015) is a series in which Coates describes the culture of wildlife photography as a fetishistic act of consumption. This works are the result of a ritualistic process where the artist makes high quality prints and compresses them in his hands. Lesser spotted woodpecker (Picoides minor) (2014), is a taxidermied starling that has been hand-painted by Coates to take the markings of this rare and elusive woodpecker, a bird Coates has never managed to see. Bassbone/Goose caller (2009) is a trombone fitted with a bassoon reed employed by Coates during his shamanic rituals to communicate with animals in his spirit world, thus being able to obtain information that they might hold.

GRANPALAZZO is an exhibition-event involving some of the most interesting, serious, and consistent artists and galleries in the contemporary art scene. The challenge of the project is to create a bridge between epochs: a respectful, reciprocal relationship between the art of the past and the interpretation of the present age. GRANPALAZZO is open Saturday May 28 and Sunday May 29 for a week-end dedicated to contemporary art.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Laura Lancaster

Shapeshifter

WORKPLACE LONDON

61 Conduit Street

Mayfair

London, W1S 2GB

Exhibition continues until 27th May 2016

Open Thursday - Friday

10am - 5pm (or by appointment)

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, 1980

Workplace London is delighted to announce Shapeshifter, a solo presentation of Laura Lancaster’s new paintings. Lancaster’s dense grayscale paintings take further her ongoing investigation of the uncanny and the abject - both concepts preoccupied with the idea of the boundary and the blurring and destabilisation of the categories it creates - and their relationship to aesthetics.

First explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch who described it as a product of ‘intellectual uncertainty’, the concept of the Uncanny was further developed by Sigmund Freud in his seminal essay Das Unheimliche in 1919 in which Freud argues that we experience the uncanny when a certain trigger brings back repressed childhood conflicts and primitive beliefs that suddenly receive renewed affirmation. The objects and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon, become a threat causing extreme mental discomfort, unconsciously reminding us of our forbidden, infantile impulses.

Lancaster’s paintings, with their distorted mask covered figures and almost mutilated features, precipitate this particular sense of unease by setting up a chain of associations for the experiencing subject. The paint has been scrubbed, smeared, scraped, and painted with fingers, leaving the viewer with the sense that the figure in the painting has emerged from a violent collision between the artist, the paint and the image. The scale of the work refers to Lancaster’s own body whilst addressing the viewer’s own interpretative body in the process. In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva describes the subjective horror one’s body experiences when confronted with one’s ‘corporeal reality’, a breakdown in the distinction between the self and the other. Lancaster’s paintings exemplify the abject by challenging the borders of the self as we perceive them and revealing an incompleteness, or lack, in ourselves.

Influenced by the palette and the expressive markings of paintings by Philip Guston and Albert Oehlen, these black and white paintings further efface the boundaries between the subject and the background as forms appear to emerge and dissolve simultaneously. This game of presence and absence serves, by nature, to further confuse and attract the viewer by erasing the distinction between the imagined and the real. The layer of paint becomes a mask in itself and as such adds further ambiguity to the work, whilst the subjects in the paintings, being far removed from their original context, seem simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.

Lancaster explores the way in which the image transforms itself during the painting process, embracing the physicality of the painted surface whilst revealing how this process distorts and destabilises the order of the photographic image they result from. The gestural marks themselves become imprints of the performative action as they self-consciously explore of the idea of painterly gesture, its significance, and the myriad ways it can be interpreted. As we are confronted by this new information that conflicts with our existing beliefs, ideas, and values (or what Kristeva describes as disturbing ‘identity, system, order’) Lancaster’s work forces us to rethink the ways in which we experience the world and ourselves, whilst questioning painting’s capacity to emote or express.

The exhibition is a reaction to the specific context of the art center itself, the MAGASIN. The show is an act of letting the audiences inhabit the art center and live it through the use of a distinctive scenography. The exhibition has been conceived as a dynamic space, presenting aspects of everyday life in dialogue with works of art.

A plural environment, containing a collection of functions and moments, hosts simultaneously audiences and art pieces. The exhibited art pieces tell the story of everyday life through active participation from an ironic, critical or ludicrous point of view. The functional spaces provide a series of support structures for an active use. These several spaces, spread around the art center, enable the visitors to use it to dialog, share, play, relax, work, read, garden...

The core of the exhibition, conceived as an amphitheater, will present a public program of talks, conferences, projections and performances that will contribute to enrich the exhibition itself.

The statement of this proposition is to present a certain mechanism which will transform an indifferent site into an accessible space full of life and possibilities. The works of art, coming from different and several context (public and private collections, interventions, site speci c), will be articulated together as an invitation for the audience to take over the art center and to participate by having an intimate experience as much as moments of possible sharing and exchange.

The idea is to open up the barriers between the audiences and the contemporary art.

Selected pieces concretize the will to generate an interactive experience: dreamy and captivating video installations, kinetic assemblages, interactive and playful display, ways of new appropriation of pop culture and mass media, ashes of wit and sense of humor. Among those works, there will be also a new production: a site speci c installation made by vegetal elements which will be in constant evolution.

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About Me

Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.